Asperger's/PDD

My own experience, from middle school until the time I graduated from college was an endless PTSD inducing catastrophic misadventure. I have a lot of physical scars too.

I quit high school for college but I was "asked" to leave college twice, under threat of permanent expulsion. It took me nine years to graduate. During that time I had a number of jobs and was at times homeless, not because my family ever refused me shelter, but mostly because my parents' house was a place of high drama, especially after my grandma moved in with them.

Out on my own I was a terrible house mate. People I lived with may have thought I was some kind of space-alien. Sometimes I felt that way myself but mostly I was oblivious, wandering in and out at all hours, eating strange foods, and inexplicably disappearing for long stretches of time.

My grandma had been evicted from the home she owned as a danger to herself and others and she was never able to stay long in "assisted living" places without causing trouble. I think the only things my grandma ever understood on this earth were hot metal, horses, horny sailors, dogs, and showing up for work on time. She became a welder in World War II and was one of the few women kept on when the war ended and the men came home. She continued working until she retired with a good pension. Her successful career probably wasn't any kind of admirable trait, instead it was a pathologic synergy of OCD and extreme resistance to change.

My kids are lucky. They have fairly normal grandparents who channeled their obsessions and manic energies into the arts and sciences. My grandparents were a dysfunctional mess of "high functioning" autism, major depression, and bipolar disorders.

I'm lucky too because modern meds and other therapies are helpful.

When I was a kid the usual guidance I got was to "tough up and be a man!" and other such balderdash. Once I'd finished with puberty I got a job as a furniture mover and people quit saying things like that, probably because they were scared of me.